200GB to 25GB: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet

Usage Based Billing (UBB) has come to Canada, and indie ISPs are starting to …

Metered Internet usage (also called "Usage-Based Billing") is coming to Canada, and it's going to cost Internet users. While an advance guard of Canadians are expressing creative outrage at the prospect of having to pay inflated prices for Internet use charged by the gigabyte, the consequences probably haven't set in for most consumers. Now, however, independent Canadian ISPs are publishing their revised data plans, and they aren't pretty.

"Like our customers, and Canadian internet users everywhere, we are not happy with this new development," wrote the Ontario-based indie ISP TekSavvy in a recent e-mail message to its subscribers.

But like it or not, the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved UBB for the incumbent carrier Bell Canada in September. Competitive ISPs, which connect to Canada's top telco for last-mile copper connections to customers, will also be metered by Bell. Even though the CRTC gave these ISPs a 15 percent discount this month (TekSavvy asked for 50 percent), it's still going to mean a real adjustment for consumers.

This is going to hurt

Starting on March 1, Ontario TekSavvy members who subscribed to the 5Mbps plan have a new usage cap of 25GB, "substantially down from the 200GB or unlimited deals TekSavvy was able to offer before the CRTC's decision to impose usage based billing," the message added.

By way of comparison, Comcast here in the United States has a 250GB data cap. Looks like lots of Canadians can kiss that kind of high ceiling goodbye. And going over will cost you: according to TekSavvy, the CRTC put data overage rates at CAN $1.90 per gigabyte for most of Canada, and $2.35 for the country's French-speaking region.

Bottom line: no more unlimited buffet. TekSavvy users who bought the "High Speed Internet Premium" plan at $31.95 now get 175GB less per month.

"Extensive web surfing, sharing music, video streaming, downloading and playing games, online shopping and email," could put users over the 25GB cap, TekSavvy warns. Also, watch out "power users that use multiple computers, smartphones, and game consoles at the same time."

You need "protection"

Here's the "good" news: TekSavvy users can now buy "insurance," defined as "a recurring subscription fee that provides you with additional monthly usage." For Ontario it's $4.75 for 40GB of additional data (sorry, but the unused data can't be forwarded to the next month).

There are also "usage vault" plans—payments made in advance for extra data. Consumers can buy vault data for $1.90/GB up to 300GB in any month.

Where once TekSavvy consumers could purchase High Speed Internet Premium at a monthly base usage of 200GB for $31.95 a month, now they can get about half of that data (if they buy two units of insurance) at $41.45 a month.

TekSavvy's DSL rates: now and after March 1

Very questionable

Starting to hate this? TekSavvy hates it, too.

"The ostensible, theoretical reason behind UBB is to conserve capacity, but that issue is very questionable," noted the ISP's CEO Rocky Gaudrault on TekSavvy's news page. "One certain result though, is that Bell will make much more profit on its Internet service, and discourage Canadians from watching TV and movies on the internet instead of CTV, which Bell now owns."

Given these dramatic changes, and the fact that ISPs around the world have made clear they wouldn't mind implementing similar schemes, it's no wonder that high-bandwidth businesses are fighting back. Last week, for instance, Netflix started publishing graphs of ISP performance in both the US and Canada, and it plans to update them monthly.

"Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs' costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced."

The big question now is how these kind of billing changes will impact 'Net consumption patterns. Many subscribers use minimal data, but that's changing as Internet video becomes the norm. If these new plans simply discourage data hogs from backing up their 120GB pirated movie collection over the 'Net every night, there's no sleep to be lost. But if they scare consumers away from legitimate non-ISP affiliated movie and content sharing sites, that should be a firebell concern to consumers, entrepreneurs, and regulators.

I wrote a letter to my MP and mailed it off this morning. I was going to email it, but thought it would carry more weight as a printed piece. I am a TekSavvy customer and my monthly data transfer is moving from 200 GB to 25 GB. An 88% drop in service, but without a corresponding 88% drop in the cost of the service.

Welcome to my world. The truly sad part is, if we had improvement in service (ie better speed) It would not have been so bad. But I'm sucking the 25GB cap at 1Mbps!!!! The upside is I can't stream HD video so I should use less, but come on, 1Mbps @ $50 with a 25GB cap. That is my reality today.

Just absurd. The CRTC claims it doesn't have the power to regulate the actual rates and yet it has the power to use UBB as an ITMP? GAS isn't a corporate entity or something, why does it need an ITMP when Bell's own published dslam figures show no congestion. The most egregious, naked money grab I've ever seen in my life.

"The big question now is how these kind of billing changes will impact 'Net consumption patterns. Many subscribers use minimal data, but that's changing as Internet video becomes the norm. If these new plans simply discourage data hogs from backing up their 120GB pirated movie collection over the 'Net every night, there's no sleep to be lost. But if they scare consumers away from legitimate non-ISP affiliated movie and content sharing sites, that should be a firebell concern to consumers, entrepreneurs, and regulators."

++

The irrational way caps are being rolled out by the giant cableco's says "you have to buy my content" not "help me conserve bandwidth". This is the crux of the net neutrality biscuit, and will indeed fundamentally alter the nature of the internet if not addressed by regulators.

I manage almost 60GB of LEGAL content per month on my connection.Because I have a 60GB cap between 8am and midnight (and unlimited from midnight to 8am) I make sure not to 'waste' my bandwidth during the day on illegal stuff, and use it only for other things like surfing the internet, watching legal streaming video (BBC iPlayer, game streams, internet radio etc.)

This still takes me close to 60GB/mo, with streaming video, browsing the internet etc. And that's while avoiding downloading large files such as game patches (or games). I still haven't downloaded the 2.5GB BFBC2 patch because I can't be bothered to set it up to download overnight. That's one patch for 1 game which would use up 10% of my entire monthly bandwidth if I was in Canada.

With basically zero attempts by ISPs to upgrade networks with their own money, and recent events showing their goal is to squeeze only what money is to be had out of existing infrastructure, there may be much greater demand for nationalization of the "pipes" and a corresponding shift to internet access being viewed as a utility more than a commercial service.

Canada has always had the problem of few people spread over insane distances. The best options when it comes to major infrastructure have frequently been a public monopoly or heavy regulation. Phones, rail, air/sea travel, and broadcasting all have (or had in the early decades) heavy public ownership or control to make sure the benefits were felt by as many Canadians as possible.

Somehow, the internet avoided this. It shouldn't have, and I hope stuff like this leads us fix it.

So as an industry we moved away from printed media and expensive (and environmentally killing) physical production and instead we are charged almost 190x the actual cost to move a GB of data? I understand needing to make a profit, create capital reserves to replace infrastructure, or have enough profit to cover govt mandates, and then also make overhead, but it does not cost $1.90 to move a Gb of data.

naked money grab by these guys that refuse to allow their business model to be usurped by Netflix. I would rather see video removed from the internet than this throttling of information by immoral corporate interests.

Ars: please stop using the silly (Telco) term "data hog"! How is someone a hog for using all, or even just a lot of, the bandwidth they rightly pay for?! Also, since bandwidth is not a finite resource, at last not in the sense that oil etc is, the term data hog becomes even more silly.

This vilification of people that use and pay for their service, simply because they take advantage if it more than others is annoying me. I know they would love for everyone to pay for 50 Mbps and only use 8 MB a month, but that's just too bad

I'm not sure if my Cable company (Cogeco) is planning on following suit or not, but if so I will be pretty pissed.

I generally strongly dislike all the stupid lawsuits I see in the US, however this is one thing I think would be justified. A class action suit against the CRTC and any of the ISP's forcing these caps on us.

I actually don't have an issue with usage based billing per se, but how they feel they can cut their bandwidth more than in half without lowering the price is beyond me. 2 years ago I had no cap on Cogeco's standard cable plan, then it became 60GB, which I didn't like but since I never use that much I didn't care much. If they go to 25GB too, I'll be switching to a 3rd party reseller just to spite them.

ROFL!!! What!? The bastion of awesomeness, Canada, which is always somewhere at the top of Ars' lists of the internet bandwidth, speed and just all things right has now been taken down a notch!?

Well, guess what, it's also a semi-socialist country and rationing is what happens when it starts getting expensive in socialism. That's right, it's not just internet. The short-sightedness of liberals is always amusing and sad to observe.

"The big question now is how these kind of billing changes will impact 'Net consumption patterns. Many subscribers use minimal data, but that's changing as Internet video becomes the norm. If these new plans simply discourage data hogs from backing up their 120GB pirated movie collection over the 'Net every night, there's no sleep to be lost. But if they scare consumers away from legitimate non-ISP affiliated movie and content sharing sites, that should be a firebell concern to consumers, entrepreneurs, and regulators."

++

The irrational way caps are being rolled out by the giant cableco's says "you have to buy my content" not "help me conserve bandwidth". This is the crux of the net neutrality biscuit, and will indeed fundamentally alter the nature of the internet if not addressed by regulators.

This. If they want to implement UBB then it should be for ALL services, even the ISP's own streaming services -- IMO that would eliminate the most grievous aspect of UBB.

Also, the ISPs have to love this new government mandated UBB -- they can charge the same amount for a connection (or more) and not have to worry about upgrading their infrastructure...all profit baby!

Dealing with crap like this is going to be one of the hardest parts of moving out of Japan. We've got great cell and internet service here and I mistakenly assumed that most other modern and developed nations did as well. But the US pays for incoming texts and phone calls (WTF?) and internet service is metered, expensive, and slow for most locales, both within the US and in Europe and Australia. I have NFI what its like in Africa or SAmerica.

This is a very unbalanced article. The major ISP's in Canada being Rogers and Bell have both had bandwidth caps for many years already but that's because they own the networks. I have a 95 GB monthly cap and have been paying substantially more for it that the folks at Teksavvy who have basically been offloading the costs of their heavy usage on the rest of us for many years.

What is happening is that the independent ISPs now have to pay usage costs for the backbone they are using. Now, we can certainly argue what the cost of the bandwidth should be, but at the end of the day, the costs of the carriers are related to the amount of peak capacity they need to provide which is somewhat correlated to bandwidth usage. Perhaps they should offer tiered pricing like they do with electricity? Like I said, we can argue about the price, that's valid, but we can't pretend unlimited caps don't hurt the bottom line.

Ars: please stop using the silly (Telco) term "data hog"! How is someone a hog for using all, or even just a lot of, the bandwidth they rightly pay for?!

I think "data hog" here is being used to define those who make arguable use of their bandwidth, not to define those who have a truly justified use. Definitely one payed for the privilege, but that doesn't exempt them from any possible criticism. If I pay for 3,000 muffins and then throw them away, it should come as no surprise if I become a target of criticism.

Someone making 120 GB daily backups of their movie collection is a data hog, regardless of their bill. Depending on the circumstances (the country's communications infrastructure) it can even be seen as irresponsible.

DrDenim wrote:

Also, since bandwidth is not a finite resource, at last not in the sense that oil etc is, the term data hog becomes even more silly.

My fear is that most Americans are too stupid to know what any of this means and that we'll be next in line for this. If this happens to me, I'll have to give up my Netflix account and most of my Steam gaming.

This is just the corporate-government plan to implement a throttled, controlled, censored, and tiered Internet to help limit the Peoples' access to real information. Make it more expensive, more time-consuming, and more of a headache in general, and get the plebes to go back to their idiot boxes and video games to keep them occupied with moronicism. That way they won't rebel like those filthy, uncivilized brownies in Egypt and Iran.

ROFL!!! What!? The bastion of awesomeness, Canada, which is always somewhere at the top of Ars' lists of the internet bandwidth, speed and just all things right has now been taken down a notch!?

Well, guess what, it's also a semi-socialist country and rationing is what happens when it starts getting expensive in socialism. That's right, it's not just internet. The short-sightedness of liberals is always amusing and sad to observe.

Maestro,

The ISPs listed in the Netflix review all had caps already. This article is about independent ISP's that rent space on those other networks and have been milking the cow for free. The vast majority already had caps.

Nothing new here. And please, you should really try to do a bit of homework before so blatently revealing your ignorance otherwise you'll continue to make a fool of conservatives.

Well, guess what, it's also a semi-socialist country and rationing is what happens when it starts getting expensive in socialism. That's right, it's not just internet. The short-sightedness of liberals is always amusing and sad to observe.

WTF are you talking about? It’s a private company in a near monopoly doing what private companies in near monopolies do; namely, allow the service/product to languish while constantly charging more for it.

This is a very unbalanced article. The major ISP's in Canada being Rogers and Bell have both had bandwidth caps for many years already but that's because they own the networks. I have a 95 GB monthly cap and have been paying substantially more for it that the folks at Teksavvy who have basically been offloading the costs of their heavy usage on the rest of us for many years.

What is happening is that the independent ISPs now have to pay usage costs for the backbone they are using. Now, we can certainly argue what the cost of the bandwidth should be, but at the end of the day, the costs of the carriers are related to the amount of peak capacity they need to provide which is somewhat correlated to bandwidth usage. Perhaps they should offer tiered pricing like they do with electricity? Like I said, we can argue about the price, that's valid, but we can't pretend unlimited caps don't hurt the bottom line.

PS: I don't work for any ISP or related company.

The point here is that the CRTC is *forcing* the DSL resellers to use Bell's business model. They can't offer alternative pricing schemes and find other ways to balance their usage to pay the peering and transit fees. Forcing these (so far, very innovative) companies to identically match Bell's business model will effectively kill them all.

All our wired plans from our providers are uncapped last I checked. We also have capped / uncapped 3G services at decent prices as well.

And prices have been falling for similar bandwidth / bandwidth has increased for similar prices over the pass few years.

Although one provider owns all the cable and another all the phone lines, we still have 3 large ISPs and a few smaller ones as well (just for wired internet access).

And now most of SG has been fiber'ed up till the last mile. And prices have dropped further. And the playing field has been made even more level, with the fiber being owned by another party which does not even provide ISP services to traditional users. The 3 main ISPs are Singtel / Starhub / M1. Go check out the prices.

If it's all because of the large population in a small area, how come you don't have similar services for similar prices in at least your major cities? Our fastest 1gbps fiber plan is at about 400 SGD (absurdly high), but the 100 mbps plan is at a decent 50 SGD. And with plans at different prices points starting at about 6 mbps.

I can't imagine myself without a 100 mbps connection, after being on one for the pass few years.

Too bad we don't have hulu / netflix, etc here. If someone started a service like that here, bandwidth will be the least of their concerns.

This is going to kill the internet as we know it. I think a lot of it is aimed at Google. Oh, and time to put some more DVD's in the netflix cue.

I have been thinking about how I could still enjoy content without the internet. If I wanted to still maintain a netflix account I would basically have to use my queue from work or public library (until they also drop internet service because prices go even higher).

I would no longer maintain my skype phone number and account. I would not get a land line. I would only maintain my emergency prepaid cell phone.

I would no longer be playing games online or multi-player computer games. I would basically have to play the single player games that don't require internet authentication. The ones that require internet authentication I would need to download cracks for at the library or work.

Besides, it will be very possible to live life without the internet. Since I'm such a tech heavy person it would also effect my spending in a positive way. Further, taking electronic games and media might also enrich my life even more. I guess I would finally have the time to start having kids

This is a very unbalanced article. The major ISP's in Canada being Rogers and Bell have both had bandwidth caps for many years already but that's because they own the networks. I have a 95 GB monthly cap and have been paying substantially more for it that the folks at Teksavvy who have basically been offloading the costs of their heavy usage on the rest of us for many years.

What is happening is that the independent ISPs now have to pay usage costs for the backbone they are using. Now, we can certainly argue what the cost of the bandwidth should be, but at the end of the day, the costs of the carriers are related to the amount of peak capacity they need to provide which is somewhat correlated to bandwidth usage. Perhaps they should offer tiered pricing like they do with electricity? Like I said, we can argue about the price, that's valid, but we can't pretend unlimited caps don't hurt the bottom line.

PS: I don't work for any ISP or related company.

The point here is that the CRTC is *forcing* the DSL resellers to use Bell's business model. They can't offer alternative pricing schemes and find other ways to balance their usage to pay the peering and transit fees. Forcing these (so far, very innovative) companies to identically match Bell's business model will effectively kill them all.

Like I said, argue about the pricing structure, don't argue that bandwidth should be free because it's not.

Pretty silly that you can use up your entire 1 month bandwidth allotment in under 12 hours. Stream 6 HD movies and you're done.

Just to put this in context: I'm currently staying in Singapore, where I have a pre-pay SIM that gives me 12GB of data a month for under $40 (total, after taxes, etc). I can tether, and usually get between 3 and 5 Mbps. And Bell is charging the same rate for a copper connection, at the same speed, with the same per month allotment. Insane.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.